Come, Before Evening Falls

If there is one theme that never gets old, it is forbidden love. The more constraints society puts on people, the more ways lovers find to seek each other out. Manjul Bajaj’s gripping novel, Come, Before Evening Falls is one such story, about an impossible love.

Set about a century ago in the Jat heartland of the Punjab province, where the khap panchayats lay down the law on kinship and marriage, Jugni and Raakha find themselves irresistibly attracted to each other. Their crime: they belong to the same gotra (subcaste) and hence can never marry.

Will the young lovers defy tradition or will it all end in tragedy? To find that out, you’ll have to read the book; meanwhile, sample the review.

I suppose they didn’t need to, whether to be accepted as a couple, have kids, raise a family, etc. The protagonists in the book *can’t* marry, let alone have a relationship. If anyone found out they were even meeting, the caste council would order them both to be killed since they were defying family “honour”. And yeah, it still happens these days.

I guess that would be an option. But it would be hard for someone who’s always been dependent on family support, and there’s a chance they’d be ostracized anyway. That’s not to say they didn’t elope in the story, or that they did!